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>you really believe that the yesod guys are marketers? I didn't say yesod had the best website, I said they put the most effort into marketing. Michael and Gr

>you really believe that the yesod guys are marketers? I didn't say yesod had the best website, I said they put the most effort into marketing. Michael and Greg do a lot of talking about yesod, and are the only haskell framework attempting to draw in people from outside of haskell. You seem to have interpreted this as an insult, it was not. Usage increases with awareness. >How so? Unless you are using your RDBMS like a dumb storage system, then persistent doesn't provide the tools to access it. We're not talking advanced stuff here, the most basic fundamentals were done incorrectly: it requires int primary keys on all tables for crying out loud. Obviously multi-column foreign keys just went out the window then too. Of all our apps here, not even the most trivial could be ported to yesod using persistent. >Any persistence layer you use with Snap or Happstack is just as easy to use in Yesod too. Certainly. But the major difference between yesod and snap initially appears to be "yesod provides high level DB access and snap doesn't". This may be true of mongo DB (I have no use for it), but for an RDBMS it actually ends up being that neither provides high level DB access, and you have to use something from hackage. >Again, how so? Happstack's webserver has several issues, space usage being a major one. This isn't a controversial statement, Jeremy will tell you the same thing, it is why he's focusing on replacing happstack-server.

maxcan 15y ago
>> you really believe that the yesod guys are marketers? > I didn't say yesod had the best website, I said they put the most effort into marketing. Michael and Greg do a lot of talking about yesod, and are the only haskell framework attempting to draw in people from outside of haskell. You seem to have interpreted this as an insult, it was not. Usage increases with awareness. There was a heavy implication that they market at the expense of engineer. > Unless you are using your RDBMS like a dumb storage system, then persistent doesn't provide the tools to access it. We're not talking advanced stuff here, the most basic fundamentals were done incorrectly: it requires int primary keys on all tables for crying out loud. Obviously multi-column foreign keys just went out the window then too. Of all our apps here, not even the most trivial could be ported to yesod using persistent. Fair enough. We try to stick to the "dumb storage system" model because it gives us a lot of flexibility and makes scaling easier. If you're integrating an existing DB, yeah, it sucks. If starting from scratch, its pretty awesome. But remember, Persistent != Yesod. You'll notice yesod-core doesn't depend on persistent at all. > Certainly. But the major difference between yesod and snap initially appears to be "yesod provides high level DB access and snap doesn't". This may be true of mongo DB (I have no use for it), but for an RDBMS it actually ends up being that neither provides high level DB access, and you have to use something from hackage. [[citation needed]] I think the principle difference is that Yesod plays to Haskell's strengths in being "radically typesafe". The amount of errors we see in compiled Yesod code is shockingly minimal.
- papsosouid 15y ago
  >There was a heavy implication that they market at the expense of engineer. I am impressed at your ability to read that which I did not write. There was no such implication, it is a criticism of happstack and snap. More talking = more users = more feedback = better framework. It is especially unfortunate that snap originally seemed to be making serious efforts at marketing, and then just sort of stopped. >Fair enough. We try to stick to the "dumb storage system" model because it gives us a lot of flexibility and makes scaling easier We avoid the dumb storage model because it eliminates flexibility, and forces us to re-implement database functionality in our app code. We're talking about starting from scratch, I just don't want to start by throwing away all the power of our database for nothing. Our biggest apps are only in the 10s of millions of rows range, so scaling isn't a problem. If it were, I'd be looking into actual dumb storage systems though (mongo, cassandra, etc) instead of using an RDBMS as a slower version of one. >But remember, Persistent != Yesod. You'll notice yesod-core doesn't depend on persistent at all. Yes, but as I said that is the big feature that yesod appears to provide vs happstack and snap. But upon closer inspection we had to go down to hdbc regardless of the framework. >[[citation needed]] I think the principle difference is that Yesod plays to Haskell's strengths in being "radically typesafe" Citation for what? That if you don't use persistent then yesod and happstack and snap are similar in functionality? I am not sure how to prove that, how about the other way? What other functionality does yesod offer that I am forgetting? Yesod avoids haskell in attempting to be "radically typesafe". You get the exact same amount of type safety by using blaze-html and web-routes in happstack or snap as you do using yesod. As I mentioned before, yesod's template haskell, quasi-quotation fetish is rather controversial in haskell land. You can get the benefits yesod offers while retaining composability and the familiarity of using haskell instead learning a DSL. The amount of errors we see in compiled haskell code is minimal, it should not be shocking that this extends to yesod.
stepcut 15y ago
I am Jeremy.. and I am not sure I would tell you the same thing. The Happstack webserver is pretty darn good. Of course, I think we can do even better. In fact, I think we can do better than warp.
- papsosouid 15y ago
  Hmm, I'm sorry to have (mis)spoken for you. I assumed you would tell him that since you appear to have been pretty open about it on the mailing list and in IRC. So you think happstack-server is better than snap-server? Or just that I am over-stating the difference? I know there was talk of switching happstack over to warp, and then more recently of writing another server instead. What is it you are planning to do better than warp, performance, correctness, features or something I'm not thinking of? Is there anything in particular that made you decide not to use warp?
  - stepcut 15y ago
    I think that as far as the end user is concerned, there is not much difference between the warp, Snap, and Happstack backends. Speed-wise, warp is maybe 3 times faster than Snap and Happstack in the pong test. Though, how that plays out in real world is hard to say. But, I doubt anyone is running a Haskell web server right now that needs anywhere close to 30,000+ requests/second. Of course, speed never hurts. Even if you are not doing a lot of requests per second, the totally latency per request counts for something. So, I see no reason for Happstack to be slower than it could be. Because Happstack is based on lazy IO instead of conduits/enumerators/pipes, there is a perception that it must be leak files and RAM like crazy. But, that is not actually true. The server handles streaming files from disk fine, and even streaming files in POST/PUT to disk in a constant space. We had to be careful inside the server code to make that happen -- but the end user never has to deal with that for the most part. One exception is when the user wants to use IO to generate a streaming response. For example, if you were wrote an algorithmic music generator that required IO and streaming an never ending MP3. To do that in happstack-server, you could need to use unsafeInterleaveIO. And, be a bit careful. But, just because lazy IO can work, doesn't mean that something like Pipes would not be better. Happstack predates enumerators/pipes/conduits, so lazy IO was the best choice at the time :) The idea of moving Happstack away from lazy IO has been an the plate for a long time (before Snap and Yesod were even created). Originally we were going to move to the hyena backend. But then Johan went on a major yak shaving expedition and rewrote the GHC I/O manager, etc, instead of finishing hyena. We did consider switching to warp. But there are a few reasons we decided not to: 1. The source code for warp did not fill me with confidence (yes.. entirely subjective). So, in the new (currently unnamed) happstack-server backend (which will be standalone similar to warp), I want to create a strong body of evidence that it actually works correctly. 2. I like pipes. At least, I like the way they are designed by starting with the core principles and semantics and trying to build something up that is based around solid math foundation like Category. Now, Michael Snoyman may be correct that pipes are not suitable for implementing an http proxy. Once the next pipes (that has resource finalization and exception handling) is out, I intend to discover if that is true or not (acme-http-proxy). (Once again, very subjective). 3. I want Happstack to be a stable platform. Historically, yesod has gone through a lot of radical changes. Something is there one day, and gone the next. My previous experiences trying to collaborate directly and indirectly with the yesod team have left me nervous about building on their work. The yesod project is focused on what is best for their own purposes -- which is fine. But, it means that if you are trying to build on it, you have to be ready to accept whatever may drop out of the sky tomorrow morning. (Also subjective). 4. the yesod dependency hell problem gives me concern as well. While the problems they are experiencing are fundamental to Cabal itself, they seem to be hit a lot harder than Happstack. So, until that is all sorted out, I don't want to make Happstack installs more likely to fail. Given that warp is less than 1000 lines, it seems like the risks and loss of control involved with trying to leverage it do not really outweigh the cost of implementing a solution that is exactly what we want. So, I am aiming for better design, performance, and correctness. In terms of features.. I'm saving that surprise for later :)

maxcan 15y ago

>> you really believe that the yesod guys are marketers? > I didn't say yesod had the best website, I said they put the most effort into marketing. Michael and Greg do a lot of talking about yesod, and are the only haskell framework attempting to draw in people from outside of haskell. You seem to have interpreted this as an insult, it was not. Usage increases with awareness. There was a heavy implication that they market at the expense of engineer. > Unless you are using your RDBMS like a dumb storage system, then persistent doesn't provide the tools to access it. We're not talking advanced stuff here, the most basic fundamentals were done incorrectly: it requires int primary keys on all tables for crying out loud. Obviously multi-column foreign keys just went out the window then too. Of all our apps here, not even the most trivial could be ported to yesod using persistent. Fair enough. We try to stick to the "dumb storage system" model because it gives us a lot of flexibility and makes scaling easier. If you're integrating an existing DB, yeah, it sucks. If starting from scratch, its pretty awesome. But remember, Persistent != Yesod. You'll notice yesod-core doesn't depend on persistent at all. > Certainly. But the major difference between yesod and snap initially appears to be "yesod provides high level DB access and snap doesn't". This may be true of mongo DB (I have no use for it), but for an RDBMS it actually ends up being that neither provides high level DB access, and you have to use something from hackage. [[citation needed]] I think the principle difference is that Yesod plays to Haskell's strengths in being "radically typesafe". The amount of errors we see in compiled Yesod code is shockingly minimal.

papsosouid 15y ago
>There was a heavy implication that they market at the expense of engineer. I am impressed at your ability to read that which I did not write. There was no such implication, it is a criticism of happstack and snap. More talking = more users = more feedback = better framework. It is especially unfortunate that snap originally seemed to be making serious efforts at marketing, and then just sort of stopped. >Fair enough. We try to stick to the "dumb storage system" model because it gives us a lot of flexibility and makes scaling easier We avoid the dumb storage model because it eliminates flexibility, and forces us to re-implement database functionality in our app code. We're talking about starting from scratch, I just don't want to start by throwing away all the power of our database for nothing. Our biggest apps are only in the 10s of millions of rows range, so scaling isn't a problem. If it were, I'd be looking into actual dumb storage systems though (mongo, cassandra, etc) instead of using an RDBMS as a slower version of one. >But remember, Persistent != Yesod. You'll notice yesod-core doesn't depend on persistent at all. Yes, but as I said that is the big feature that yesod appears to provide vs happstack and snap. But upon closer inspection we had to go down to hdbc regardless of the framework. >[[citation needed]] I think the principle difference is that Yesod plays to Haskell's strengths in being "radically typesafe" Citation for what? That if you don't use persistent then yesod and happstack and snap are similar in functionality? I am not sure how to prove that, how about the other way? What other functionality does yesod offer that I am forgetting? Yesod avoids haskell in attempting to be "radically typesafe". You get the exact same amount of type safety by using blaze-html and web-routes in happstack or snap as you do using yesod. As I mentioned before, yesod's template haskell, quasi-quotation fetish is rather controversial in haskell land. You can get the benefits yesod offers while retaining composability and the familiarity of using haskell instead learning a DSL. The amount of errors we see in compiled haskell code is minimal, it should not be shocking that this extends to yesod.

stepcut 15y ago

I am Jeremy.. and I am not sure I would tell you the same thing. The Happstack webserver is pretty darn good. Of course, I think we can do even better. In fact, I think we can do better than warp.

papsosouid 15y ago
Hmm, I'm sorry to have (mis)spoken for you. I assumed you would tell him that since you appear to have been pretty open about it on the mailing list and in IRC. So you think happstack-server is better than snap-server? Or just that I am over-stating the difference? I know there was talk of switching happstack over to warp, and then more recently of writing another server instead. What is it you are planning to do better than warp, performance, correctness, features or something I'm not thinking of? Is there anything in particular that made you decide not to use warp?
- stepcut 15y ago
  I think that as far as the end user is concerned, there is not much difference between the warp, Snap, and Happstack backends. Speed-wise, warp is maybe 3 times faster than Snap and Happstack in the pong test. Though, how that plays out in real world is hard to say. But, I doubt anyone is running a Haskell web server right now that needs anywhere close to 30,000+ requests/second. Of course, speed never hurts. Even if you are not doing a lot of requests per second, the totally latency per request counts for something. So, I see no reason for Happstack to be slower than it could be. Because Happstack is based on lazy IO instead of conduits/enumerators/pipes, there is a perception that it must be leak files and RAM like crazy. But, that is not actually true. The server handles streaming files from disk fine, and even streaming files in POST/PUT to disk in a constant space. We had to be careful inside the server code to make that happen -- but the end user never has to deal with that for the most part. One exception is when the user wants to use IO to generate a streaming response. For example, if you were wrote an algorithmic music generator that required IO and streaming an never ending MP3. To do that in happstack-server, you could need to use unsafeInterleaveIO. And, be a bit careful. But, just because lazy IO can work, doesn't mean that something like Pipes would not be better. Happstack predates enumerators/pipes/conduits, so lazy IO was the best choice at the time :) The idea of moving Happstack away from lazy IO has been an the plate for a long time (before Snap and Yesod were even created). Originally we were going to move to the hyena backend. But then Johan went on a major yak shaving expedition and rewrote the GHC I/O manager, etc, instead of finishing hyena. We did consider switching to warp. But there are a few reasons we decided not to: 1. The source code for warp did not fill me with confidence (yes.. entirely subjective). So, in the new (currently unnamed) happstack-server backend (which will be standalone similar to warp), I want to create a strong body of evidence that it actually works correctly. 2. I like pipes. At least, I like the way they are designed by starting with the core principles and semantics and trying to build something up that is based around solid math foundation like Category. Now, Michael Snoyman may be correct that pipes are not suitable for implementing an http proxy. Once the next pipes (that has resource finalization and exception handling) is out, I intend to discover if that is true or not (acme-http-proxy). (Once again, very subjective). 3. I want Happstack to be a stable platform. Historically, yesod has gone through a lot of radical changes. Something is there one day, and gone the next. My previous experiences trying to collaborate directly and indirectly with the yesod team have left me nervous about building on their work. The yesod project is focused on what is best for their own purposes -- which is fine. But, it means that if you are trying to build on it, you have to be ready to accept whatever may drop out of the sky tomorrow morning. (Also subjective). 4. the yesod dependency hell problem gives me concern as well. While the problems they are experiencing are fundamental to Cabal itself, they seem to be hit a lot harder than Happstack. So, until that is all sorted out, I don't want to make Happstack installs more likely to fail. Given that warp is less than 1000 lines, it seems like the risks and loss of control involved with trying to leverage it do not really outweigh the cost of implementing a solution that is exactly what we want. So, I am aiming for better design, performance, and correctness. In terms of features.. I'm saving that surprise for later :)